This book uncovers, explores and analyses the cultural and social factors and values that lie behind waste making, recycling and disposal in the Asia Pacific region, where impressive economic growth has led to significant increases in production, consumption and concomitant waste production.

This volume demonstrates the immense scope of waste as a multi-sectoral phenomenon, covering discussions on food, menstrual products, sewage, electronics, scrap, nuclear waste, plastics, and even entire villages as they are submerged underwater by dam building, considered expendable in favour of economic growth. It discusses the wide range of approaches and contexts through which people interact with waste, including socio-economic analysis, participatory observation, laboratory science, art, video, installations, literature and photography. Case studies focusing on India, China and Japan, in addition to other regional examples, demonstrate the ubiquity of waste, materially and geographically. It examines the duality of waste management, fostering community building while simultaneously excluding marginalised groups; how it can be linked to efforts creating circular economies, to then reappear in oceanic garbage patches; or technical waste repurposed for high-tech laboratory research before being discarded once again.

This timely and wide-ranging collection of essays will be an important read for scholars, researchers and students in sustainability, development studies, discard studies, and social and cultural history, particularly focusing on countries in the Asia-Pacific.

Viktor Pál is a Hungarian environmental historian, an Associate Professor at the University of Tampere, Finland, and the University of Ostrava, Czechia, and a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of the book Technology and the Environment in State-Socialist Hungary: An Economic History (2017), and with Stephen Brain has co-edited the collection of essays, Environmentalism under Authoritarian Regimes. Myth, Propaganda, Reality (2019).

Iris Borowy is a Distinguished Professor at Shanghai University, China. She is also a founding director of the Center for the History of Global Development at that university. Her publications include Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future: A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission), published in 2014.